Friday, March 8, 2013

Latin American Legal History: An ASLH Workshop

[Our friends in the ASLH have asked us to move this post up, as the deadline is approaching.]

The American Society for Legal History (ASLH) invites paper submissions for its first annual ASLH Workshop, which will be held immediately preceding the ASLH annual meeting in Miami/Fort Lauderdale (Nov. 7-10, 2013). The workshop is sponsored by ASLH to promote scholarship in areas of legal history that have been traditionally underrepresented at ASLH meetings and in the Law and History Review. This year’s workshop topic is Latin American Legal History. (Workshop topics will rotate on an annual basis.) The ASLH Legal History Workshop will bring together authors and noted scholars in the field in order to work collaboratively toward refining scholarly writing. An important objective of the workshop is encouraging scholarly conversations among historians of legal systems from a broad range of historical periods and places.

In order to keep the workshop size small, only four to five papers will be selected from among responses to this general call. Each selected paper will be assigned one commentator who will prepare substantive feedback about the structure, organization, methodology, and theoretical approaches of the paper. All papers will be pre-circulated to participants and to commentators in advance of the workshop and must be read prior to the workshop meeting. Authors will not present their papers. At the workshop, each commentator will be given half an hour to discuss his/her assigned paper, followed by an hour of general discussion in the larger group. In this way, each individual author will receive feedback from all the participants of the workshop. ASLH will provide limited funding for travel expenses and accommodations for authors of selected papers. (Participation in the ASLH Legal History Workshop does not preclude individuals from presenting at the ASLH annual meeting.)

We invite submissions that engage any aspect of Latin American legal history from scholars at any point in their academic careers. Interested authors should submit their work-in-progress papers to aslh.workshop@gmail.com on or before April 1, 2013. Papers should include complete contact information and should not exceed 15,000 words (including footnotes). Papers in Spanish or other languages will be considered if an abstract (one to two pages) is included in English. Submissions must not have already appeared in print or have been accepted for publication. Authors of selected papers will be informed on or before May 30, 2013. Please direct questions to the ASLH Workshop Coordinator: Lena Salaymeh, Robbins Post-Doctoral Fellow (lenas@law.berkeley.edu).

By participating in the workshop, authors agree to revise their papers thoroughly and to submit them for publication consideration (i.e. blind peer review) with Law & History Review on or before February 1, 2014. (Submissions to Law & History Review should be not more than 12,000 words, including footnotes.) Upon peer review approval, Law & History Review will publish the papers either together (in an issue dedicated to Latin American legal history) or separately. Authors participating in the Workshop consent to publishing in Law & History Review, even if publication delays occur. However, participation in the ASLH Workshop is not a guarantee of publication in the Law & History Review. (Also, the ASLH Workshop organizers and the Editor of Law & History Review cannot guarantee a specific publication date.)